Soulash

While enjoyable for a few hours this game is regrettably just mediocre. There are better alternatives in the genre, I can't in good conscience recommend this over them. The sequel is much the same.

Soulash is a nice game featuring my favourite trope: a villain protagonist (more precisely, one that destroys the world). As you grow and become stronger, you take on larger foes, destroy entire regions/factions and slay more and more important gods of this world. Soulash is very successful at fulfilling this power fantasy. You watch your character becoming stronger, and killing gods grants you powers and/or decays the world in a significant way in accordance to the god you killed. For instance, when the god of Blood dies, all water transforms into blood. I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this. I also loved exploring the map, finding new places, and discovering new gods (reading their description, their role, personality, cults, etc.). The gameplay is pretty unique and entertaining, a turn-based roguelike with a sight mechanic, and many items you can loot around the world with various stats and a durability system (which isn't that bad honestly). A big problem though is that it's a roguelike with permadeath. I'm okay with permadeath; you play more, understand how it works, and git gud. The problem is that not only it's a pretty hard game, it's also very long. Dying right at the end means losing like 8 hours. That's quite infuriating. Then coupled with the fact that the map never changes and each run is the same, this makes it infuriating and boring (unless changing playstyle). No wonder why only 1.8% of people actually finished the game. My other grip is the balancing of races and classes. Races offer nothing, the +1 or +2 stat increases are literally useless, and everything else is just minor gimmicks that don't change at all how you play. As for classes, they only guarantee you'll get one of the three spells you can select upon levelling up. At first I tortured myself playing Knight with only Knight spells. I then switched to Warlock, occasionally choosing other spells here and there, and I won the game on my very first run with this class. This class has just way better spells. You could win as a Knight by simply choosing any magic spell over Knight spells, but then what the ♥♥♥♥ is the point of playing as a Knight to begin with? Ridiculous. Then there are other smaller problems, in my case being: imperial city way too big while map too small, edgy writing (I like the story, but the writing could have been better), enemies dropping less experience when you level up, no tutorials on how to summon gods (I was missing out on a lot of the fun), and finally a leaderboard that the game shows you when your run ends but that you can't actually consult anywhere. They're nothing much but they do contribute to the annoyance. (Also, where the ♥♥♥♥ are Ravager and the God of War? Why leave traces of them in the game and hype them if they don't actually exist?) Despite its flaws, I liked it, and I felt many different emotions (from extasy to despair), which is pretty important for a video game I think. I recommend this game if you're patient.

8/10 my type of game, has a few issues so not a nine, tens are nearly imposible on my scale, this is an amazing game that I want more of, cant wait for the full release of Soulash2!

Rouge like

Impossible to outrun even starting area enemies. Doesn't help that generating a new world takes entirely too long.

Be a Soulash, not a Selaco.